What is moving you today?

It's Saturday morning and I wonder... what is moving you today? I am moved by the thoughts of Barbara Brown Taylor in her memoir Leaving Church. She is one of my favorite writers who awakens me to the sacred, and heals, and stretches and leads me to rest. We need others to stretch us. We need others to stir in us a spirit that causes us to seek for answers of our own. A recovering people pleasing comfort addict, I can say this. I speak from experience when I say that staying "comfortable" never takes us to new heights and depths. No, it's pain that reveals the Healer, it's walking on water to find you can, it's loving the unlovable that opens your heart to reveal His compassion, it's seeking and questioning that takes us to a new level of faith and experience. This brings me to Barbara's thoughts on the words of Luke....the words that are stretching me today.

In Luke’s gospel, there comes a point where He turns and says to the large crowd of those trailing after Him, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their father and their mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, you can not be my disciple.” (14:26) Make of that what you will, but I think it was His way of telling them to go home. He did not need people to go to Jerusalem to die with Him. He needed people to go back where they came from and live the kinds of lives that He had risked His own life to show them: lives of resisting the powers of death, of standing up for the little and the least, of turning cheeks and washing feet, of praying for enemies and loving the unlovable. That would be plenty hard enough for most of them. 

— Barbara Brown Taylor

Hmmmm....it does make you think doesn't it? It would be plenty hard enough to go home and live out what Jesus revealed to us in a life surrendered to I only do what the Father does. (John 5:19) The son obedient to the Father was washing feet, and turning cheeks, and resisting the enemy and standing for those who couldn't stand for themselves. He was accepting those divorced and hurt and cast out. He was feeding sheep and revealing the glory of the Father as He healed and accepted and delivered those who sought Him.

Can we truly claim we are Christian if we aren't following His way?

Shouldn't we be grateful that the calling isn't to "hate" those you love to be His disciple, but rather to go home and be that love and leak that love? And then humbly we should give everyday up as an offering wholly surrendered to be that love thanking Him that we don't have to live the sacrificial life as Paul, Peter and John to make that love known. His love was so real to them that it was worth dying for, and yet for us, we can hardly give up a Saturday to attend a women's event to simply get refreshed or touched or healed. Maybe today, I am what is stretching you?